Lela Pierce is a Minnesota-based artist whose paintings map ancestral healing through experienced and imagined confluences of energy, both in and outside of the corporeal body. From the artist, "My painting aesthetic is influenced by several traditions. From those of my kin, I look to African and Eastern European textiles and patterns. I have also seriously studied and integrated the aesthetic of Madhubani painting, indigenous to Bihar, India under the guidance of Manisha Jha in New Delhi. These stylistic traditions resonate deeper with me than other Eurocentric methods, which have historically excluded women of color from their canon of “high art”. I am interested in claiming these aesthetic lineages as a non-essentialized woman of color, maintaining aesthetic roots, and adapting them into a more contemporary context."